23 sample banks
Source: http://www.freesounds.org
Harvested: March 2010

This turned out to be a monumental and sizeable task.  We'd originally wanted a collection of sound loops to be used in applications to construct loop-based music.  Turns out that in order to amass a nice, solid 8 or 9 gigabyte set of useful sampled loops and effects, it would take an entire multimedia sprint dedicated to just that because there's a LOT of randomness out there on the interwebs.

Such a dedicated sprint is not out of the question, in the future.

In the meantime, we ended up with a really solid set of sample banks instead.  These will be quite useful to musicians comfortable with samplers, but I'm afraid possibly overwhelming for the hobbyist musician wanting to just sit down and make some cool songs from loops.  Hang in there, hobbyists, we haven't forgotten you.

To be fair, though, we did get some gems.  The TMA-Waveworld sounds are unbelievable (congratulations, you've just downloaded well over $3000 worth of synth sounds!), and the Yamaha DD-8 is pretty much a full sample set of the, well, Yamaha DD-8 (pipe that into Hydrogen and see what you can't do with it!).  

The Commodore64 sounds are super cool, too.  And I have to admit to getting a lot of use already from the modest contribution of the maintainer of the openMolar project; he grabbed the KDE4 sound set and uploaded it and they now populate my GNU/Linux-based Android phone as ring tones and txt alerts!

Otherwise, these are sound files.  Big and, hopefully, merely the beginning.


-the Secret Order of Linux Multimedia Sprinters